From the course: Soon Yu on Creating Timeless Brands

What is scaling power, and how do you create it?

From the course: Soon Yu on Creating Timeless Brands

What is scaling power, and how do you create it?

- So once you've created great noticing power, that creates distinction and really speaks to your key point of difference and helps you stand out, and you have great staying power about this idea of taking that noticing power and making it highly relevant and timelessly relevant, the next goal is to create great scaling power, so what's scaling power? Scaling power is the ability to have as many people recognize you for that distinctive relevance as possible. It's trying to create universal recognition for that distinctive relevance, and if you do that over time, with enough people, then eventually, you have longevity, and through the longevity, you become a standard bearer for that distinctive relevance, and that allows you to achieve iconic status. When I think of a brand that's done scaling power very well, I actually go back to this idea of the MINI. The first thing they did is, they understood what they needed to protect, and they were able to take that and scale it into new product extensions, so they turned it into a convertible, into a station wagon, and most recently, they turned it into the Countryman, which is sort of a elevated, beefed up version of the MINI, but that's only because they understood their iconic brand language. Now, the key in scaling power isn't this idea that you're just universally recognized for your brand name or for your logo. The goal for scaling power is that people recognize you for your signature elements, and so, the three opportunities to create great scaling power are, one, through marketing, that creates more awareness, two, distribution, that makes it much more available, so more and more people are using it and more and more people can see people using it, and three, in terms of taking your iconic signatures and turning it into a family of products and extending it into new product categories and segments.

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